


Night in pining ardour

by myoue



Category: Yuri!!! on Ice (Anime)
Genre: Drunkenness, Friends to Lovers, M/M, Pre-Relationship, they talk in the way that best friends talk
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-10-07
Updated: 2018-10-16
Packaged: 2019-07-27 20:51:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 5,688
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16227104
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/myoue/pseuds/myoue
Summary: They're the sort of friends that talk about a potential romance between each other far too often and casually to be normal. But, after all, nice and good looking people always have romance on the mind.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> i had a revelation--if i put line breaks, suddenly i liked it a little more. and then i put chapter breaks and i was completely seduced. i now know i have a sexual attraction to line breaks, paragraph breaks, and chapter breaks like no tomorrow.
> 
> happy thanksgiving weekend!!

The only time in their story of unclear romance that Victor can remember Yuuri not having taken the traditional route started when both their mouths were full of sweet peach slush and Yuuri tries to hide behind the devilled wind blowing by using a cupped hand blocking it from his face.

Victor uses the word traditional here in this sense to mean _their_ sense of traditional—his and Yuuri’s. It’s inclusive of such things as the undue amount of laidback stargazing they do, gazing into each other’s eyes, hearing 80s power ballads, and attributing the longing lust to artificial nostalgia.

They have the tendency to forget the directions to places they’ve been to before but being wholly uncaring about it.

And they dance—carelessly and arbitrarily and together. Around and around and around.

-

“You’re the only one I ever flirt with,” Yuuri mumbles in self-vilified embarrassment behind the half-clear container of slush that he’d managed to swallow down in five seconds.

“Is that so?” Victor’s eyes stray to Yuuri’s nibbling teeth as well. All casually.

Yuuri starts chewing into his straw, the pinks of his ears hiding into his oversized hoodie bunching up around his shoulders. “It is so.”

He’s intent on staring straight into the table despite being so daring with the direction he swerves this conversation into.

 “I’ve been thinking about it,” Yuuri says. “I guess since the first time we ever met, since the first thing I ever said to you until now, it’s all been… flirting of a sort. Ah. Damn it. Now that I think about it, it could be construed as that. To other people, it might seem like that.”

“Oh? All the way since the beginning then?”

“Yeah.”

“Does this so-called flirting ruin our pure and innocent friendship then?” Victor asks with a pouting lip. “Have we been bad?”

“No, but I think all the passionate late night sex might have corrupted it somewhere.”

“Wow, if we’ve been having late night sex this whole time and you never told me, I’m going to be pretty upset.”

“You’re right. I was mistaken. We would never.”

Victor smiles. This is so fun. It always is.

“I can’t help it,” Victor purrs.

“What?”

“Whatever this is that we do. I don’t see it as flirting.”

The rough drudgery of Victor’s voice has Yuuri committing an unintentional pause. “...Me neither.”

But Yuuri is right. From the very first thing Victor had ever said to him, he might’ve wanted to have a little too much fun. Right from the get go. And so from then on until now, Yuuri also knows very well the kind of person Victor is—the kind who’s in love with a theatrical opulence and an indulgence of contradiction.

Probably Victor's number one concern is that he wants things to be as easy as possible for himself and Yuuri in order to combat the deluge of thinking and sensory overload that’s so typical of the two of them. Things are as they are. Things happen as they may happen. In the beginning, he couldn’t quite keep up with Yuuri’s rapid-fire pace. And there’s an argument to be made that he still can’t to this day.

In turn, Yuuri would take advantage of his own inherent intrigue that he knows Victor is fascinated with, with his usually soft spoken demeanor that spins a complete one-eighty sometimes. Because he has such the insane inclination, an instinct he can’t take control of, of liking to do this. He’ll embellish. He’ll flair. With Victor, there isn’t any kind of commitment to act a certain way.

“I don’t know how to go about this,” Yuuri says honestly but in typical quiet, worried, Yuuri-fashion. His fingers curl protectively around the clear plastic edges of his cup. His bangs dangle in a freefall when his head dips slightly forward for a sip, and all Victor can see are his soft roots, touched dark brown and pretty-smelling.

“Mm,” Victor acknowledges.

“So…” His finger draws a picture or some sort of equation on the table. “You know, when people, _other people_ , have had these movie dates, several dozen coffee dates, talk to each other a lot, bumping into each other a lot, just a lot of hanging around everywhere a bunch of times…”

“Uh huh.”

“Do you… have any idea? What do people do after a certain point? Where do they go from there? Has anyone ever told you about the specifics, of this sort of thing?”

“Hmm?” Victor thinks out loud.

But just from that Yuuri seems to understand, nodding in teeny tiny movements and letting out a breath. “I was only wondering. Just curious. Err, back home, people have this weird way of being very upfront about it, I think.”

“Really? How upfront?”

“Upfront like… pulling you back behind a stairwell and confessing every single one of their feelings to your face. And then asking you a yes or no question about it.”

“Reeaally? Did people confess to you? What was it like?”

“H-hold on… no! Nobody’s ever… of course not. And before you ask, _no_ , I’ve never… to anyone myself.”

“Ohh, what do they say? Come on, confess to me like they would. I wanna know.”

“You already know! The stuff of movies and anime. It’s really just that.”

“All that’s true?”

“It is.”

“I want to hear you say it though.”

Yuuri’s face screws up, slouching further against the table. He briefly canvasses the store, waiting for just the right level of chatter so what he has to say gets lost in it. “Just stuff like, things like, _I’ve loved you for a long time_ … _please go out with me_ … _do you like me back, yes or no_ … seriously, don’t make me say anymore.”

Victor’s lip curls, feels it tingle all the way through his body. “Okay, okay,” Victor says with a crazed grin. “I’m thoroughly seduced so we can leave it at that.”

It doesn’t matter how many movies or shows or animes he watches with Yuuri. Apparently, Yuuri’s always been the studious type. He’s worn glasses since elementary school but he doesn’t believe it has any bearing on his smarts. He was athletic and kept his grades up at the same time. He’s competitive. Victor has absolutely no doubt in his mind that someone, maybe more than one, some years ago was leaning with their head on their desk in the same class as Yuuri—staring at the back of his head, with heartache for one hardworking winter boy. There had to have been.

“But! What if they want to confess their hatred of you?” Victor challenges.

“They’d probably say _I hate you_.”

“Seriously? In Russia that’s our _I love you_.”

“W-Well, Americans don’t say anything at all,” Yuuri explains hurriedly. “Which is the strangest?”

“I think in America they smash or pass.”

“Is that the starting point?”

“More like the end point.”

“But at what point is the point?” Yuuri exclaims. “The point, you know? That tips you over the edge? It seems too scary, too. If you’re not on the same page, if one person sees something differently… how do you know? Are your feelings reaching them if you don’t say anything? Are theirs reaching you?”

“Did you accidentally date someone for months without knowing?”

“N… No! I’ve never—Victor, you’re not listening…”

“I am! I’m listening. I hear what you’re saying. It’s complicated, right? Love is so complicated.”

Yuuri’s head nods towards the table again, his lips pressing together into a delicate line, not anything hard or pressured, more in a solemn sort of understanding. “Yeah. I guess that’s just what I’ve been thinking about lately. People are… weird. I know I’ve said that three times now. And everything’s confusing.”

“They are. And it is. I’m no good with all that.”

“Liar.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“ _Theworldsnumberonebachelorslashheartbreaker_ ,” Yuuri lets slip under his breath.

“I heard that.”

“You didn’t. Well, what about you?” Yuuri asks with more genuine curiosity. He tips his empty cup with the straw towards him. “Have you been looking? Or are you just sort of doing your own thing now...?”

“ _Mmm_ , I suppose I’m desperate enough to say I’m always open. And you?”

“Desperate…?” Yuuri glances up very quickly at him before away again. He’s the one who’s the extremely bad liar. As an added bonus, he tends to get unintentionally breathless sometimes without being able to hide it well. “Err, me? I’ve stopped,” he says shortly, like he’s standing on the edge of a cliff.

Slow and seeping, Victor becomes so curious. He wants to hold Yuuri back from the cliff or jump with him, but he’s not sure which. It might depend on where Victor is in the scenario. “Stopped looking? Hoping?” he offers.

“...The first one.”

At a moment’s notice, Yuuri can make everything feel so intimate.

For a long time now Victor has stopped looking too.

And not because they keep trying to torture each other with irreverent hypothetical questions, at least not intentionally. When Yuuri gets like this, Victor doesn’t have much to say because—none of it feels real. The things they say don’t hold any weight.

He can’t imagine talking like this with anyone else. Instead, overthinking—having tears of anxious hope, of longing, of expectation and anticipation.

The subtly playing pop music seeps from inside the store they’re sitting just outside of, to the tune of the year 2016 and not 1986, and Yuuri has been adamant in refusing to look him in the eye for longer than the fraction of a second it takes to realize Victor’s still staring horribly at him.

He’d called Victor to this place, this antique jungle café with real growing green vines along the walls and books with covers made physically out of tree bark on the shelves. They’d ordered slush from this hardcore coffee shop. But why would such a place have fruit slush on the menu?

“What are you thinking about?” Victor prompts.

Yuuri looks so concerned with something. He brings his hands to his face, taking several long measures to recover his breath, and keeps at it like that.

Again, as if under duress and talking only to himself, he starts to rant, “So, so, sometimes I wonder if I’ve been waiting too long. Often I feel like I’ve completely missed my chance, and by the time I realize it, I’ll have missed it again. And it’ll go on and on like that. There are so many factors and no one’s made any sort of rule book yet. I need… guidance. How are you supposed to know what to do, I just don’t know—”

“Yuuri, hey! What are you talking about? If you want to ask me something then go ahead and ask me.”

“I-I don’t have anything to ask,” Yuuri splutters beleaguered and insistent through his hands now. He brings his hands back down and now he’s smiling. But he’s looking off to the side. Like he’s laughing at himself or at this situation that he's so elegantly managed to get himself in. “I lied. You caught me. Really. You don’t make this easy at all.”

Victor wants to reach over, perhaps to hold Yuuri’s face in his hands to make him look directly at him, perhaps only to make a point. “If things were that easy, would they be worth it?” Victor says seriously.

“If they’re too hard, I’ll end up not acting on them at all,” Yuuri argues.

Huh?

Oh—yeah…

Somehow, Victor tends to feel that way too.


	2. Chapter 2

“You look tired,” Yuuri tells him, not cutting Victor any slack with his drooping grey bags that fill out his dark circles.

“Do I?” Victor responds, reaching up to pinch both of Yuuri’s cheeks in his two fingers in protest. It should be common knowledge by now that Victor is sensitive to comments directed at his appearance. So in effect he’ll feel perfectly reasonable when he argues back, “Shouldn’t you be more tired? From your flight and all.”

But Yuuri shakes his head. “I’m not really. I slept the whole way. Next time you should come back with me.” He says this completely offhandedly while handing Victor a stack of registration forms for new skaters to the rink. “Unless you have your hands full.”

“Don’t joke,” Victor mumbles, taking the stack and hating it if that’s just something Yuuri is saying to tease him. “I’ll really do it. I’ll crash your hometown again. Anything to get away from this paperwork.”

Yuuri twirls in his office chair from where they sit in the rink gallery, leaning his chin against the back of the seat. It’s his first day back and he’s already got his blue sports jersey and track pants on but it doesn’t look like he’s planning on doing much else. “My family will be so flattered to hear that you think of them as just above the enjoyment level of paperwork.”

“Ah, ah, this character assassination. Your family would be ashamed.”

“When they love you _so, so_ very much.”

Victor hums, a combination of bothered and offended and unconvinced. “I’d actually love to go back, but—and I don’t know why I think of it like this—can you imagine bringing the same guy back home every year for the next fifty years? I wonder at what point they’d start to question it.”

Without missing a beat, Yuuri says with a snort, “I should think by the time the forty-ninth straight year rolls around they might start to suspect something.” He leans down into his seat, his cheek resting against the back of it regarding Victor with his eyes in that cruel way that he does when he prepares to say sentimental things. “But will we still be friends for fifty years?”

And even though Victor should be used to it, it still sounds odd. For some reason hearing something said so solemnly like that really strikes him.

He has to pause to think: of course. Is that really such a crazy idea that he has to ask? Or is that just something Yuuri is saying to say? Like all the other things he _just says_ for fun?

Victor shrugs his shoulders a few times, lining the papers up to do later. He doesn’t answer immediately because it’s not something he’s put a lot of thought to up till now, like how he can’t quite comprehend a lot of things that are simply too big for him. The generations of all the human lives that have come before him, how they would have their own lived-out fifty years to their existence, and how small of a place his own lifespan occupies in this ever expanding universe.

As just a plain idea or words on paper, he could very well be friends with Yuuri for the foreseeable future and beyond. But what exactly that entails—keeping up communication for all that time, hitting midlife crises side by side, getting married, retiring—is all a mystery. Is it really doable? At least, is it fair to make such a promise when neither of them knows what the future will hold?

“We’ll be friends for forty-nine years,” Victor claims with adjunct profundity and gives a wave of his hand like it’s a done deal now, continuing, “and then after the fiftieth year we’ll probably be so tired of each other. We’ll have a dramatic fight and a falling out and then, you know, we’ll be like eighty years old by then so we won’t agonize too much and die straight after. At least we have all the way until then to look forward to.”

He gives Yuuri a smile and Yuuri gives him one back, a tight-lipped jovial one that’s holding back laughter, like he should’ve known this was going to be the stupidly useless answer Victor would give him.

“Thanks for the reassurance,” Yuuri says.

During practice, Victor thinks he’s losing it when he forgets his train of thought once, twice, three times amongst his mind buzzing with other imaginations.

From where he’s teaching some of the little ones in the rink, he can still out of the corner of his vision see Yuuri doing another mindless spin in the twizzle chair up in the gallery, looking tired and bored out of his mind because Victor had insisted he be given a day off, just one day, maybe even just the morning and he can come back to the ice in the afternoon if he’s really feeling restless. But somehow Yuuri refuses to leave the premises of the actual rink, and all the while Victor can’t help thinking the sedentary life doesn’t suit Yuuri much.

-

Sometime after work, Victor keeps accidentally calling the bartender over, over and over again, when all he wants to do is get the cheque and call it a night. But before he can get a word in Yuuri would always end up ordering one more glass of whatever it was that he was drinking and Victor has to keep reminding him that this is going to be their last one. To get his money’s worth, that’s what Yuuri would keep saying over and over again like it’s something he only just thought of at that moment. It’s happy hour, he declares to the whole bar. All Victor can remember is ordering one more, one more, for himself at the same time so Yuuri doesn’t feel left out.

They drink a lot. And they hug a lot. Yuuri keeps trying to kiss the side of his head, leaning sloppily against him, knocking him into the next barstool over. Yuuri’s so heavy. But then he suddenly laughs like he’d meant to do that the whole time.

Someone, somewhere, asks Victor if his friend is available and Victor blinks at them with both his eyes and says no. On a separate occasion, perhaps a separate someone, they ask if Yuuri is Victor’s type—and he says yes that time. Can they please stop asking? Aren’t best friends supposed to be each other’s types? What kind of a stupid question is that? Of course, he loves Yuuri’s hair and all the things he says that makes Victor laugh and the lovely way he smells and the way they can’t ever seem to stop touching each other.

Tell me that you love me the most, he slurs to Yuuri with a hand on one of his knees and a confidence that he draws from somewhere deep and paleolithic within himself. Convince me. Tempt me. Seduce me with all you’ve got. He knows Yuuri has it in him to be bold. At some point, he remembers being vaguely kissed on the lips.

Yuuri, Yuuri. Victor hooks his arms underneath Yuuri’s elbow. We should go? Come on?

On the way home they run down the sidewalk, the wind whipping by them which is a feeling that Victor has always adored. He chokes on his breath asking out loud if he’d paid the bartender their tab. He hopes he did and that they had enough money between them to pay otherwise it would be really bad if they didn’t. Yuuri doesn’t answer, skipping happily alongside him, which means Victor has to check his wallet later to make sure all his cards and IDs are still there.

They kiss again when they both fall gracelessly onto Yuuri’s bed. He feels hands holding him close and Yuuri’s breath burning hot and slow, like being enveloped in a blanket of molten lava. Have they ever been this close before? Have they ever wanted to be?

Victor slides his legs in and around the sheets trying to make sense of it all, feeling warm and generous with the way he presses his fingers into the folds of Yuuri’s clothes and the dips of Yuuri’s skin to get his attention. Somehow, if he really thinks about it, he’s perfectly okay with growing old with Yuuri, hitting midlife crises side by side, and becoming old men as they retire together peacefully. It seems like a dream, one full of comfort and dizzying happiness.

Hey, hey, Victor says under his breath so no one else will be able to hear him. Let’s do that thing that people do, that thing where we promise to marry each other if we haven’t already done it by a certain age.

And what age is that? Yuuri attempts back.

Thirty, Victor suggests.

Aren't you thirty? Yuuri says.

Oh, right.

Forty.

Too long from now.

Okayyyy.

Do you want to get married right now?

He’s not sure if Yuuri agrees to that in particular or of continuing to kiss. He’s not sure. Not really of anything.

But Yuuri doesn’t wait for any conclusion to come to, his hands continuing to crawl, until Victor’s sure he’s about to lose his mind from the heat. He ebbs somewhere between how they shouldn’t be doing this, how they _really_ shouldn’t be doing this, and that they’re being bad friends. How did this happen? How could this happen?

For a moment, he has the strangely vague and yet crystal clear thought that he’ll remember all this in the morning, but he’s not sure if Yuuri will. He’s really not sure of anything.

How did this happen?

Well—

Victor thinks somewhere inside of him he's wanted this the whole time.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> oof. how didthis happen. indeed


	3. Chapter 3

The next morning, Victor nurses a headache the likes of which he can’t even begin to describe. In the peripherals, there’s something faintly playful and melodic—sounding like jazz music. It’s tinny and close, playing out of one of their phones sitting on the desk. It’s been going all night. Or all day. What time is it?

Yuuri lays beside him dead as a log on his stomach and facing the other way. He’s not wearing a shirt and neither is Victor. In fact, Victor’s not wearing anything which worries him just a bit. But he knows he has a tendency to strip down to nothing after being even a little drunk.

He hopes—

This doesn’t mean—

The blanket comes up halfway to Yuuri’s torso.

When Victor sits up, the room spins and he has to steady himself with a hand down. He can barely bring himself to open his eyes, and all he wants to do is lie back down and use as little energy as possible not thinking about anything. The room seems too light but not overwhelmingly so. If it’s still early morning, that would be great.

He knows his tendencies—even amongst a lowered sobriety he’s never done anything insane.

With his eyes glued shut, he draws his leg up like he’s getting out of bed, trying to make the movement seem as natural as possible. He traces the front of his foot up Yuuri’s bare calf muscle, up his equally bare thigh, until he finds and roams over the distinct cloth that Victor can recognize is indeed covering his—

Yuuri lets out a sharp gasp, flinching with his whole body and shoving further into the pillow that he has both his hands grasping under. The sound is so startling, and at the notion of being caught, Victor pulls his leg away immediately.

“What are you doing,” Yuuri whispers.

“Oh,” Victor whispers lightly back, panicking just a little. “You’re awake.” He puts a hand to his neck and laughs awkwardly in the weird air still with smooth jazz playing off to the side. “I was just, um… checking.”

“For?”

He pauses, not quite sure how to word this. “Nothing…” Victor says slowly, like he has to convince himself of it as well. “Nothing… happened.” It’s true, at least to what he believes.

Yuuri doesn’t make any movement or response to that.

Victor takes this time to jump out of the bed, scurrying around the room blindly and shivering the whole time because he’s pretty naked, stepping over scattered clothes and other things strewn confusingly across the floor like empty plastic water bottles and candy wrappers. He can’t help taking responsibility for the mess because Yuuri, and Yuuri’s room, are normally perfectly immaculate. Victor finds his underwear and dashes with it to the bathroom.

Once he gets there he stands in the middle of the floor, a little less naked now that he has his underwear on, he doesn’t know what else to do besides pee and use his borrowed toothbrush for when he stays over. Should he shower? He feels somewhat sticky. But he hadn’t asked Yuuri first. He finds his phone hanging precariously halfway off the edge of the sink counter with several missed texts, a couple from Mari and some of which even from Yuuri from the previous night.

Strangely, Mari finds it easier to yell at Victor through text than at her own brother. _Why can’t you guys decide on anything?_ He can hear her words in that exhausted older-sister-to-the-both-of-them voice that means she cares, that’s why she’s being harsh. _God, you’re both so annoying_. _You know you can just talk to each other, right?_

Which means the phone continuing to play the jazz music outside is Yuuri’s. It creeps in through the door the whole time Victor is standing there brushing his teeth and not quite knowing how to feel about any of this. He doesn’t feel necessarily bad but he also doesn’t feel completely... _good_. It’s a strange thing, that’s all he can end up saying—but not in a bad way! Never in a bad way with Yuuri. Just—he’s nervous. Sometimes they get into these tentative moments. And he knows Yuuri really well, he does. They’re good friends, the best of.

He doesn’t want to overstep. That’s the one thing that keeps him here in his place, at a respectable distance, with a disembodied hand on the doorknob not having the strength nor the willpower to come out.

He can’t help wondering if Yuuri hates him now. After some amount of time passes, he thinks Yuuri might have drifted back off to sleep simply from the fact that the music keeps on going. Or maybe he’s just as ashamed to get up as Victor is to leave the bathroom.

-

Yuuri K—after being newly licenced—is the one to drive Victor home every day after their practices and he hasn’t missed this once except for the times he’s away.

In between the Skating Club days, Yuuri travels back to his hometown for holidays and local festivals and to help out during the busy season. He brings back red and gold good luck tags and obscure snacks made out of things from the sea that Victor’s never seen or heard of before. Victor will make a huge deal of this, believing himself to be a worldwide man. But Yuuri, unaffected, is the type who will eat absolutely everything with a straight face.

The most recent trip back, his family had been huddled around the TV in the main room. Yuuri would tell Victor all this against the rain slapping down hard at the windshield of their car. They’d asked Yuuri if the two of them were something yet, an object, an item, whatever, because they’d all been spending their days with the residents having _sake_ -addled fights whilst replaying footage of their videos that would turn into slow-motion nitpicking rewinds and getting out Google Translate for interpreting colloquial English. The next door neighbours and the elders would be invited in so they can have a say, and apparently it’d just become so agonizing watching the two of them beat around each other like moths to a flame. But they’re both the moths and they’re both each other’s flames.

In response Yuuri would’ve told them all _no_ , the admission pulled out of him through his own sheer exhaustion with himself, and it would turn out that not even his own family believed him when he says that.

When he tells them no, over and over, each more definitive than the last, it starts to feel like a deeper and deeper lie within what he thought was a perfect truth. He sits on the tatami floor with cushions underneath his arms and back against the wall, and his constant tossing and turning practically leaves the whole thing open for discussion even though he doesn’t feel like voicing what can only be described as substantially different, not necessarily discomforting. And perhaps he shouldn’t have quite worded himself the way he did.

His love for Victor is his comfort zone and always has been. That’s what he would say. He relays this in the car to Victor without any stopping or timbre wavering in his words. For as long as he knows, this is the one thing he’s capable of doing right. It isn’t an excuse or an excitement that makes him red from the tips of his nose to the ends of his heels.

Because, after all, his routine’s been exactly the same for years. It’s in his vague morning weather update after he wakes up. His five-minute stretch before his twenty-minute jog when he gets antsy and his cloudy unpredictably-orange sunset over the Hasetsu water at twilight. It’s the way things are done, and will keep going on and on and on, indefinitely.

They’d wanted him to text or call and ask right away, right then and there while they were all watching him huddle further and further into the cushions so they could be the first in the whole world to hear the good news. They believed any time is the right time to propose a question for so-called happier days. Because they _knew_ without a doubt that Victor wouldn’t mind.

Because they’re being facetious when they tell Yuuri to just look at him, see the way he smiles and how kind and understanding he is. And it’s because it’s Yuuri. Victor has good eyesight and a dancer’s balance and a weak spot for him—the way his stares linger, never too far, without a single momentary break.

But even if they tell Yuuri this like it’s obvious that there should have been some turning point, he has no idea what it’s supposed to mean. It’s so embarrassing. This is the worst thing he could think of to do—ask in front of his family just to appease them, just because he’s being pestered about it. He couldn’t do something like that to Victor, not over the phone while he’s halfway across the world. Victor—who loves being against all odds, quiet in the loudness of nosey newspaper headlines, loud in quiet rooms, and rubbing his fingers into Yuuri’s skin during the events that Yuuri decides to walk away from cameras lighting up too close to his face. Victor loves eccentricity but hates obtuse things. Yuuri can’t.

In truth, Victor knows he doesn’t understand as fully as he could. The stories that Yuuri tells him only share so much and he leaves the rest to himself, where no one, not even Victor, deserves to know all the shoddy grotesque details of. These are snapshots after which Victor has to fill in the blanks on his own, knowing himself to be both an unreliable narrator and desperately rose-coloured. Yuuri is unfair. He says so many things that lead Victor down a dangerous thought path.

Maybe, in fact, Yuuri was outright lying before when he’d said Japanese people pour out all their feelings into a single heartfelt confession, with a yes or no question and picturesque pink _sakura_ falling in the background. After all, he has never once given Victor an answer that could be considered straight.

And he does no such thing here either, except for ending his story by making another promise to send more money back home, twice that of what he’d usually been sending. All the while, he quietly gasps into the back of one of his hands, the other still firmly on the wheel as they drive home under a wet and foggy night, until he sounds like he’s nearly out of breath. Victor sits on the heels of his palms, unable to say or do a single thing.

-

In the light of the afternoon, Yuri Plisetsky stands in between them as they order coffee from the café they all frequent around the corner from the rink. Except Yuri P. never orders coffee because he thinks it’s bitter and disgusting and something that adults drink because they're bored. He swallows down sugar doughnuts like his life is ending. “Are you guys fighting or something?” he exclaims loudly to the both of them and to the entire store.

Neither of them answer the question.

“Ugh, I can feel the tension.” Yuri shivers in overdramatic fashion, putting his arms around himself. “Can you guys seriously stop? This is making me uncomfortable. I just want you to be friends again and for things to go back to normal.”

“Are _you_ going to tell him, Victor?” Yuuri K. says curtly, not turning his attention away from the menu board despite always knowing what he’s going to order.

Victor sighs, putting a finger to his temple. “Yuuri’s mad at me because I asked to borrow his phone charger and then I lost it.”

“Are you _serious_.”

“That was the only one I had,” Yuuri states without emotion.

“You guys haven’t been talking for days because of _that?_ ”

“I said sorry,” Victor says.

“No, you know what? You guys are fucking unbelievable. You make us all worry being all mopey and shitty and then it's for something like this. I want my time back where I was actually concerned about you two for once. No. Fuck off. I'm leaving you guys behind. Find your own way back.”

Victor curls his lip, throwing Yuuri a smile when the fifteen-year-old tiger prince goes on ahead first to order. Yuuri smiles back at him, hesitant at first, and then softening like he can’t believe the audacity of Victor. He can’t help his first instinct. It’s shy and slightly held back like the first time they met—of warm reassurance that no amount of hot coffee in his hands can match—that makes Victor think everything’s undoubtedly going to be alright between the two of them after all.

 


End file.
